Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction Civic Drama and Worship
- Part 1 Corpus Christi Play
- Part 2 The Selection and Organisation of the Cycle
- Part 3 Feast of Feasts
- Part 4 … or Feast of Fools
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Liturgical References
- General Index
Part 2 - The Selection and Organisation of the Cycle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction Civic Drama and Worship
- Part 1 Corpus Christi Play
- Part 2 The Selection and Organisation of the Cycle
- Part 3 Feast of Feasts
- Part 4 … or Feast of Fools
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Liturgical References
- General Index
Summary
In the last chapter we saw how the York Cycle can be linked to the feast of Corpus Christi. In particular, the cultural moment of its emergence coincides with a return to sacramental orthodoxy, in the form of a reaffirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation and a vogue for devotion to the Sacrament of the Altar. If we can accept the central motivating focus of the cycle as being essentially sacramental, because of the feast it was devised to celebrate and the devotional climate of its time, we can begin to move away from a view of the organisation of the cycle as primarily biblical. This is not to deny that each narrative episode indicated in the Ordo paginarum and dramatised in the Register is drawn from the Bible and arranged in historical narrative sequence: but the experience of biblical text and story for the fifteenth-century layperson was very different from that of a lay Christian from the Early Modern period onwards, when printing and the production of cheap Bibles in the vernacular supplied a predominantly Protestant English market with the texts which were central to devotional practices. In the England of the York Cycle, the lay worshipper's commonest experience of the Bible was one of being read to as an integral part of worship. The organisational time-frame of this reception of biblical texts was not primarily historical but calendrical, as Bible stories were organised as a set pattern of readings in the liturgy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City , pp. 31 - 36Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006